It bears repeating: God doesn’t owe you a damn thing. That He doesn’t owe you anything doesn’t mean He doesn’t offer anything. It’s self-evident in many ways that, if you are reading this, there are some things He’s already given to you, and continues to give. There’s a reflection of this duality in the two forms of logic we have with us, deductive and inductive. The Greeks and Islamic scholars formalized it, but everyone works it out informally, every day, without thinking of the process. It’s the nature of our minds and how they interact the material universe.
Deductive logic involves categorization and math—the hard facts of life. If it’s a crow, it’s a bird. 2 + 2 = 4. These sorts of evaluations are true no matter what kind of word games we try to play. The object of a “crow” is such as it is because any human anywhere will perceive it with their bare senses more or less “as it is,” and will place it under the category of “bird,” or whatever label is chosen. It can also fall under many other categories and it will fall under most of those categories, cross-culturally, always. The one in question here is what English speakers designate as “bird.”
Inductive and predicate logic aren’t as rigorous and accounts for errors and gaps in information. It involves degrees of certainty: “some” and “most” are key words that we use to express the varying widths of wiggle room we have. 2 gallons plus 2 gallons equals 4 gallons some of the time. If you add 2 gallons of rum to 2 gallons of motor oil, you end up 4 gallons of something but it’s not 4 gallons of rum or motor oil. From certain perspectives you get zero gallons of anything useful for human consumption or engine life. This is an odd example but I use it to illustrate the accounting for quality in this form. The more materially wise among us know when to express things as induced, uncertain knowledge and nearly-always certain, categorical knowledge.
The recent happenings with Puerto Rico and the ongoing drama with the Greek economy are indicative of the current trend of the last few centuries of forcing the inductive into the deductive realm. The dictates of bureaucracies and banks can’t change basic math, or even the ability of a group of human minds to continue to jerry-rig the backwards-reverse Sudoku game of centrally planned economies. Eventually the numbers won’t come out right no matter how many rows or columns you add. People simply don’t have the mental capacity to account for all things a group of rulers need to account for, neverminding the two ethical issues of crafting the economic environment for millions based solely on the interests of people who will not bear responsibility for the nightmare they birth, and the issue of levying future taxes on incoming generations of producers of wealth. In either case, the people affected have no say in the matter.
Read that last sentence a few more times. “Having no say” in things is really the relationship we have with reality. In my case and for many others, reality is usually synonymous with God, but you don’t need to believe in God for this. For sure, there are some things, really inconsequential in the long run, that we as limited agencies can decide upon, but God, as the ultimate knower of Himself as objective reality, can only give us a peek of what that is. And only a peek is not enough to fully comprehend the whole, even inductively. We weren’t designed (or, if you wish, “evolved”…it works with either concept) to control things that are outside of our natural charge: like ourselves, family, some concepts here and there and objects with which we are able to interact regularly. Outside of that, you’re risking more and more uncertainty, and “teaming up” just compounds the problem. 1 bureaucrat’s mind plus another’s doesn’t equal more than 2, and it usually equals much less that.
My advice, distilled from my hundreds of years of living on earth: acknowledge your expertise in the few things that you a inclined to know, be humble enough to acknowledge degrees of uncertainty as you move outward concentrically from your realm of expertise, and when you see things coming down the pike don’t pretend you can control completely when it lands in your lap. You owe it to your own mental health state to not ignore reality. You’re going to be setting fires that will consume more than you think.
EDIT: I wrote this mentally a few days ago, but Ed has some similar thoughts on the subject here and here.